Linguists and

Meaning
Introduction to Linguistics
 Most linguists make no attempt to understand how ideas or
words arise in the mind. They are much more concerned with
how ideas are expressed in words and combinations of words
once they do arise. Nor are they really interested in the
quantity and quality of responses to various kinds of verbal
and nonverbal stimuli and in the mathematics of information
theory. However, certain problems of meaning are of interest:
for example, such problems as the role of syntax in meaning,
the nature of synonymy (how utterances can be said to have
the same meaning) , and the question of semantic universals
(what characteristics of meaning are common to all
languages).
 Additional reasons exist for this noticeable reluctance to deal with certain
kinds of problems. For a long time, students of language intermingled
statements about linguistic forms with statements about meanings: nouns
were said to be naming words, sentences to be groups of words that made
sense, and interrogatives to be groups of words that asked questions. Many
structural linguists decided to cut a way through the resulting jungle of
confusion by removing considerations of meaning as far as possible from
their work with linguistic forms and systems. They argued with considerable
conviction that since a language is a system of forms used to convey
meaning, an investigator who uses meaning to describe the properties of
the system cannot hope to come to an adequate understanding of either
the formal system of a language or meaning itself, nor to escape circularity
and tautology.